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Plagiarism of Medical Text in Medical Apps

In a recent post, Timothy Aungst from iMedicalApps.com sheds more light on the trend of copying established medical textbooks and repurposing it in a medical app that they sell on iTunes. Aungst cites a recent report in BMJ, where three doctors, “Afroze Khan, Zishan Sheikh, and Shahnawaz Khan face charges of dishonesty in knowingly copying structure, contents, and material from the Doctor’s Guide to Critical Appraisal, by Narinder Gosall and Gurpal Gosall, when developing the app, representing it as their own work and seeking to make a gain from the plagiarised material.” Not only did the doctors plagiarize the text, but according to Aungst and BMJ the doctors also sought to increase their ratings within iTunes by writing reviews of their own apps without disclosing an conflict of interest.

This type of plagiarism is not new. In fact as Aungst states iMedicalApps.com Editor, Tom Lewis, discovered several apps in iTunes that plagiarized other works. (I wrote a brief post about Tom’s finding while I was on vacation last year.) I can see from Tom’s comment that while he never heard directly from Elsevier regarding the issue, YoDev apps LLC had all of their apps pulled from the App Store.

Copying and re-posting a book online or through bit torrents for free is so 2005. Welcome to the new world where plagiarizing can make you money. All you have to do is steal the content and sell it in an app. They are also sneakier than they were in 2005. They aren’t selling the app under the original book title, they are changing the name and trying to market it as something totally different. Hmm it seems requiring users to use personal logins to view the PDF is really working to curb copyright violations.

***Update***

According to an updated BMJ article, the doctors accused of plagiarizing The Doctor’s Guide to Critical Appraisal to use in their app Critical APPraisal, have been cleared of plagiarism by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service.

“A regulatory panel rejected charges by the General Medical Council (GMC) that Afroze Khan, Shahnawaz Khan, and Zishan Sheikh acted dishonestly in knowingly copying structure, contents, and material from a book, The Doctor’s Guide to Critical Appraisal, when developing their Critical APPraisal app, representing it as their own work, and seeking to make a gain from the material.”

Shahnawaz Khan and Afroze Khan were also accused of dishonestly posting positive reviews of the app on the Apple iTunes Store without disclosing that they were co-developers and had a financial interest in the app. The GMC found that Shahnawaz Khan no evidence that he knew that the app, which was initiallly free, would later sold for a fee. His case was concluded without any findings. However, the GMC panel found that “Afroze Khan’s conduct in posting the review was misleading and dishonest.” Yet they considered this type of dishonesty to be “below the level that would constitute impairment of this fitness to practise.” The GMC panel said it was an isolated incident and did not believe it would be repeated in which they “considered his good character and testimonials attesting to his general probity and honesty and decided not to issue a formal warning.”

One thought on “Plagiarism of Medical Text in Medical Apps”

It would appropriate for accuracy purposes to remove the offending article that your website has published and write a correction article similar to the bmj suggesting that they have been cleared. You have written above that the doctors have plagiarised the app which the gmc found unfounded

Since publishing this the gmc have cleared the doctors for plagiarism and no evidence of such activity was found